Where Defeat Is Not An Option

life issues

Whether it be because the Fall has really brought men nearer to less desirable neighbors in the spiritual world, or whether it is merely that the mood of men eager or greedy finds it easier to imagine evil, I believe that the black magic of witchcraft has been much more practical and much less poetical than the white magic of mythology. I fancy the garden of the witch has been kept much more carefully than the woodland of the nymph. I fancy the evil field has even been more fruitful than the good. To start with, some impulse, perhaps a sort of desperate impulse, drove men to the darker powers when dealing with practical problems. There was a sort of secret and perverse feeling that the darker powers would really do things; that they had no nonsense about them. And indeed that popular phrase exactly expresses the point. The gods of mere mythology had a great deal of nonsense about them. They had a great deal of good nonsense about them; in the happy and hilarious sense in which we talk of the nonsense of Jabberwocky or the Land where the Jumblies live. But the man consulting a demon felt as many a man has felt in consulting a detective, especially a private detective; that it was dirty work but the work would really be done.. A man did not exactly go into the wood to meet a nymph; he rather went with the hope of meeting a nymph. It was an adventure rather than an assignation. But the devil really kept his appointments and even in one sense kept his promises; even if a man sometimes wished afterwards, like Macbeth, that he had broken them.

In the accounts given us of many rude or savage races we gather that the cult of demons often came after the cult of deities, and even after the cult of one single and supreme deity. It may be suspected that in almost all such places the higher deity is felt to be too far off for appeal in certain petty matters, and men invoke the spirits because they are in a more literal sense familiar spirits. But with the idea of employing the demons who get things done, a new idea appears more worthy of the demons. It may indeed be truly described as the idea of being worthy of the demons; of making oneself fit for their fastidious and exacting society. Superstition of the lighter sort toys with the idea that some trifle, some small gesture such as throwing the salt, may touch the hidden spring that works the mysterious machinery of the world. And there is after all something in the idea of such an Open Sesame. But with the appeal to lower spirits comes the horrible notion that the gesture must not only be very small but very low; that it must be a monkey trick of an utterly ugly and unworthy sort. Sooner or later a man deliberately sets himself to do the most disgusting thing he can think of. It is felt that the extreme of evil will extort a sort of attention or answer from the evil powers under the surface of the world. This is the meaning of most of the cannibalism in the world.

For most cannibalism is not a primitive or even a bestial habit. It is artificial and even artistic; a sort of art for art’s sake. Men do not do it because they do not think it horrible; but, on the contrary, because they do think it horrible. They wish, in the most literal sense, to sup on horrors. That is why it is often found that rude races like the Australian natives are not cannibals, while much more refined and intelligent races, like the New Zealand Maories, occasionally are. They are refined and intelligent enough to indulge sometimes in a self-conscious diabolism. But if we could understand their minds, or even really understand their language, we should probably find that they were not acting as ignorant, that is as innocent cannibals. They are not doing it because they do not think it wrong, but precisely because they do think it wrong. They are acting like a Parisian decadent at a Black Mass. But the Black Mass has to hide underground from the presence of the real Mass. In other words, the demons have really been in hiding since the coming of Christ on earth. The cannibalism of the higher barbarians is in hiding from…civilization… But before Christendom, and especially outside Europe, this was not always so. In the ancient world the demons often wandered abroad like dragons. They could be positively and publicly enthroned as gods.

What specifically brought that passage to my mind was this story of horrors in the Congo, including what appears to be ritualistic cannibalism: cannibalism not caused by people starving and thus eating whatever comes to hand, but engaging in it for reasons of magic…to obtain some power or favor. What was forced into hiding by the coming of Christian civilization – even in very much non-Christian areas of the world – is now out and about; openly stalking the world.

Of course, we don’t believe in demons, do we? Well, no matter: they believe in you.

It isn’t just in the Congo. There is a cult rapidly growing in the Americas called Santa Muerte – Holy Death. It is a pagan religion which fuses pre-Columbian native religious ideals with elements of Catholic imagery. The cult is very popular among gangsters, especially gangsters in such organizations as MS-13. When you hear about the horrors perpetrated by MS-13, you’re not just hearing about gangsters being gangsters, but very likely finding out about horrific practices by people who have dropped Christian civilization in favor of the worst sort of demonic paganism (side note, I once came into direct contact with some people who were into this – I very nearly fled in terror; there was a very dark evil about them). This desire for the power of demons is getting to be everywhere – and people from all different backgrounds are joining in. After all, what are the Jihadists but another death cult like Santa Muerte or those cannibals in the Congo?

Another thing which got me on to this subject was reading a couple weeks ago a “historian’s” take on the massacres carried out by the Aztecs in their religious practices (do keep in mind that Santa Muerte derives as lot of its views from the Aztecs). This was a typical Progressive bit of drivel about how we Westerners – imprisoned by our racist, colonialist past – simply cannot understand the deep meaning and inner beauty of The Other. This is what really irritates me the most about the Left: their abandonment of basic, human decency in viewing the world. Its actually quite easy for any person to understand what the Aztecs were up to – it is the same thing an MS-13 gangster, Jihadist or a Congo cannibal is up to: perpetrating horrors in order to obtain or retain power. The Aztecs knew full well what they were doing was wrong. If they didn’t, then the Aztecs, themselves, would have volunteered to have their still-beating hearts ripped from their chests. But, they didn’t. They captured foreigners and used them for the sacrifices, thus easily demonstrating for anyone with room temperature IQ that the whole edifice of Aztec religion was a con. Brutal and deadly, but still a con.

All one has to do to penetrate a con like this is ask that question: are the people selling the con submitting themselves to the worst aspects of the con? Just as an example: the USSR: the con being sold was that even if things were bad, they were all equal and everyone was working to build a glorious, socialist future. Fine. Except those who were proclaiming this as true lived in high-end dachas and were allowed to shop at well-stocked stores the common people couldn’t enter. Con. The Jihadist leaders – proclaiming that God wants these things to happen and those who die in the cause will get a one-way ticket to heaven. Once again, fine. But if you really believed that, you’d volunteer to strap on the bomb vest, yourself. Con. And so it was with the Aztecs.

Another aspect overlooked – or, perhaps, ignored? – is how cool it is. You and I recoil in horror from such things and that is good; but not everyone does. Ever wonder why people slow down to look at a car wreck? What are they hoping to see? Some gore. A horror. Something to wake them up from their dream, even if what wakes them is a nightmare. We’re all susceptible to it. To go from rubbernecking at a car accident to ritualistically slaughtering people – and, perhaps, eating them as well – isn’t that far a step. It is a step, thank God, most of us don’t take…but it is the smallest step you could take. It’s merely a matter of stopping hoping to see something horrible to just making it happen. And if you’ve got the stomach for it, you can go far. Whole empires have been founded on it. People do like a spectacle, after all. And if you feed them that, they’ll put up with a lot from you. And those who don’t like it will often fall silent for fear of being ground up in it. As long as you aren’t having your heart ripped out, being forced to strap on the bomb vest, being forced to recant in a show trial…maybe just keep your trap shut and it’ll all blow over?

But our problem is that it isn’t blowing over – it is, in my view, getting worse all the time. Demons are like that – never quite satisfied. You, invoking them, might think that you’ll do it just this once and then be done with it, but the problem with doing wicked things – as in all forms of rapid descent – is that stopping is hard, and gets harder the further down you go. And we’ve gone quite a long ways down. Think how low we Americans – arguably the most Christian people remaining in the world – have fallen: 60 years ago, abortion was almost entirely illegal in the United States…now we have people who are seriously arguing that even a born child isn’t fully human and can justly be killed. We have people demanding we celebrate abortion as a good thing…we’re not very far off from going Carthaginian here…you know, getting dressed up in our Sunday best and heading out to watch a baby being roasted alive. But, Mark, you say: this isn’t demonic. It is wrong – maybe even stupidly wrong – but it isn’t demonic. It is based upon Enlightenment thinking, even if it is being taken the wrong way. We don’t worship demons here!

Well, yeah, we do. There’s a reason God says that He is a jealous God…not because He needs our worship, but because He knows that if we worship anything besides God, we’ll eventually make a demon out of it. It is an old risk in paganism – all paganism. Even the most clean and respectable sort of paganism has that risk. You might wish to worship the spirits of the field and that isn’t all too wrong…you need those fruitful fields. But, after a while, you’ll find that you’ve left off worshiping the spirit of creation and have started worshiping the demon of mere sexual appetite. The Romans probably had to the most sane paganism of any high civilization of the past, but even in Rome, were you to transport yourself back into that time, you’d find in well-appointed gardens of highly civilized men and women a status of Priapus. Not something you’d want on your lawn…well, not something you would want. But you know as well as I do that plenty of our neighbors would be delighted to have that vulgar thing out there.

Think about this: plenty of people are saying we need things like abortion and birth control to keep our population low, or even reduce it, because too many people means the Earth dies. Have you really rolled that idea around in your head? Once you do, you realize that such people are saying that the Earth has intrinsic value…that it is something which has worth outside that which is assigned by rational minds. If we weren’t here, the world would be worthless – nothing of any consequence would ever happen. The people who want to “save the Earth” have made the Earth their god…and are willing to sacrifice children on the altar of their god. It is paganism as senseless as any practiced in the pre-Christian past. But think of the tens of millions who really think we have to “save” the Earth…and who are willing to sacrifice human life to do so.

Death is the crucial thing here – the taking of human life. You see, once you’ve participated in that, it is very hard to not back to the hilt the idea which convinced you to go along with it. Of course, it is the last lie out of Hell that a person can’t change. Indeed, the price for any sin we have committed or might commit in the future – regardless of how horrible – has already been paid in full. Anyone, no matter how hardened a sinner, can change – and glory to God, some do. But let’s admit that it is difficult; and the more deeply a sinner has gone into sin, the harder to pull back. There gets to be a sense that there is no going back. And when the sinner has really hit rock bottom, he starts justifying the sin as a good thing. Like this: there are likely many men who are firm advocates for abortion because they once paid for someone’s abortion. Further: once you’ve done that, you might perhaps become a historian who suddenly finds human sacrifice to be not all that bad…or someone who figures that the jihadist might have a point.

There are many battles to be fought, and many worthy battles, at that. We can’t just concentrate on one thing. But I do ask that everyone give a thought to this battle I have noticed: the battle against the demons. God tested Abraham with human sacrifice but once – and stayed Abraham’s hand. God doesn’t want our deaths. To me, it stands to reason that anyone who wants a human death – who desires it as some good thing – is standing athwart God; against all that is good and decent. And it doesn’t matter if you desire to bring about the death via ritualistic cannibalism; a bomb vest, an abortion clinic or an assisted suicide…if your desire is death as a good thing, then you are in league with demons, and I’m against you.

And I think, ultimately, this will prove the most important battleground of our era. A fight between those who want to use death as a means to an end and those who wish to use life as a means to an end. Not for nothing were people moved to talk about a Culture of Life and a Culture of Death. I think they were moved to talk about it in those terms by a higher power. Because it is the crucial thing – do you want life, or death? I want life – and I want everyone to have life. I might be forced by circumstances to agree to killing, but I’ll never think of killing as good. This puts me against people who think that killing, as such, can be good, or can accomplish some good thing. Such people who believe in death have their piles of corpses, but I’ve yet to see any of the good things they said such corpses would provide. On the other hand I see those who want life…and I see them alive. To me, this is an unanswerable argument.

You might have heard of the case, but if you haven’t, Alfie Evans is a British toddler suffering a terrible disease from birth. He’s been on life support and the government has decided that further efforts should not be taken to treat the boy and so have decreed that it is time for him to die – the parents take exception to this, but they don’t count. The kid has gotta die: the government says so…and even if it would cost the government nothing (or, in this case, cost the government even more to prevent health care from being applied), the death must happen.

Where did this come from? The first moment someone said that abortion should be legal. There’s a rather bright line here, folks: we’re not supposed to kill people. Even killing in self defense is still in the nature of “least bad” rather than “good”. Once you cross that line and say that some killing is good, then you have broken down the barrier…and in a short time, all killing will be good.

Remember: abortion was only supposed to be used in the most extreme cases: hundreds of millions of deaths later, we see where that went. We were told at the start of the “death with dignity” push that it would only apply to fully conscious adults who were incurable and suffering untreatable pain. Now, we see it being applied to some poor kid who, though ill, is not apparently at death’s door, given the fact that he didn’t die when they took him off life support. But, the government is resourceful: since the kid didn’t cooperate by dying immediately, I’ll bet they’ll eventually come up with the Schiavo Alternative and just let the kid starve to death. Now, just to get it out of the way: yes, some times health care is pointless. If a person can’t breath on their own, it may be time to die. If they can’t metabolize food and water, it is definitely time for them to die. But in each case, on their own time…if you can’t breath, you’ll suffocate…and if you don’t suffocate in a few minutes, it isn’t moral to have a pillow put over your head to hurry matters along. Can’t eat? Well, try – see if it digests. If it does, you get to live…if it doesn’t, you’ll die. But don’t refuse to give food to a sick person on the theory they can’t digest and/or can’t live much longer anyway.

They will decree our deaths for any and all reasons if we keep down this route. Addict? Die. Not too smart? Die. A little bit too smart? Die. Believe in silly superstitions like Christianity? Die. You think they won’t? You think these people who are killing a little kid – having 30 police in place to prevent the parents from taking the kid out of the hospital – won’t do that as soon as they have the power? What is to prevent them? Moral conscience?

Our only path back from this is to re-affirm that life is sacred – that each, individual human being has dignity and must be treated as such from conception to natural death. Abortion must be banned. The end. If we don’t do that, then these murderers masked in false mercy will eventually sit in judgement on our lives and decide if we get to live, or not.

Robert Stacy McCain points out an interesting speech given by the Prime Minister of Hungary:

The situation, my dear friends, is: They want to take away our country! . . . They want us to hand it over willingly to others. To strangers from another continent, who do not speak our language, who do not respect our culture, our laws and our way of life. Who want to replace our way of life with theirs. From now on they do not want us and our descendants to live here, but someone else. . . .

There is no exaggeration in this! We can see it day by day, as great European peoples and nations, step by step, area by area, from city to city, lose their homeland. The situation is such that those who do not stop the migration at their borders will be lost. Slowly but surely they will be consumed. All of this by external forces, international powers that are trying to force it upon us, with the help of their local allies, and they see the upcoming election as a great opportunity for this.

Viktor Orban, the Prime Minister, has come under fire not just for his opposition to Muslim immigration but, also, because he does flirt around the edges of anti-Semitism. It is, perhaps, a great pity that Soros is of Jewish ancestry…because genuine anti-Semites (I don’t think Orban is such) do latch on to that fact and use it to feed their anti-Jewish conspiracy theories. Be better if Soros was cracker through and through, as far as that goes. But, he’s Jewish…and so we have to put up with neo-Nazi dimwits using that fact…and Progressives using the neo-Nazis as a an excuse to paint anyone who opposes Soros’ vision as being anti-Semitic (and we’ll leave aside the growing and rather nasty anti-Semitism rising on the left these days).

I don’t believe that the elites of our civilization planned things to come out this way, but I do believe that they are pleased with how it has come out. After all, those Germans and French and British were so, so tiresome! All their noisy patriotism and insistence upon being, well, German, French and British! Simply deplorable! Much better if they simply shift into the hereafter and allow the Ruling Class to Rule without having to trouble with them.

But the bottom line is that Europe’s population is dying off and it is being replaced by immigrants. They are largely Muslim immigrants simply because of proximity – the Muslims are closer to Europe than anyone else who might want to live in an increasingly roomy Europe. But the real problem isn’t that the elites are allowing immigration but that the immigration has become possible due to Europe’s sterility. Orban makes a strong case, but I don’t see him hitting at the problem: Hungarians aren’t having kids.

Hungary’s population peaked at 10.7 million in 1980 – it is now about 9.8 million. A nine hundred thousand person decrease in less than forty years; and it happened without war, famine or plague. It was just that Hungarians stopped having kids. In 2017, the population suffered at net decrease of about 40,000. 9.4 people were born per 1,000 while 13.5 per 1,000 were dying. If you want to do the math, you can probably figure out to within a decade or two when the last Hungarian will die, if trends continue. If Orban wants Hungarians to be living in Hungary in the future, his task is to convince his people to start having children. No point, really, in keeping the Muslims out when a day will come when there’s no one there to stop them from coming in.

And so it goes not just around Europe, but around the world. Most of the countries of the world which still have a fertility rate above replacement (ie, higher than 2.1 children per woman) are in Africa, and even there birth rates are dropping very rapidly. And that, I think, was deliberately planned. Remember? The “population explosion”? How we were going to breed ourselves into utter destruction? Well, we sure as heck stopped that! We birth controlled and aborted ourselves into a situation where we’re not having enough kids and for ever more countries, the number of people dying is starting to exceed those being born. Europe did it so well that the Ruling Class, desperate for someone to pick up the tax burden of the Welfare State, started to import any warm bodies they could find…as if people plucked willy-nilly from a totally different society could actually fit into the welfare-soaked, pagan carnival that is Europe! But, the Ruling Class doesn’t mind that problem…they, personally, are well-guarded and as long as it doesn’t cost them political power or wealth in the short run, they simply don’t give a damn if their actual nations die.

What is amazing to me is how everyone welcomed this – people might have vigorously rejected this, that or the other thing of the Progressive ideology, but no one seems to have rejected the idea of sterility. Everyone wants to get in on that gig of not having kids, or at least not having enough of them to matter. I’m guilty, too! I have no kids. Of my parent’s six kids, there have been six children born. Only fifty percent of what we needed to produce just to break even! And we’re Catholics! You think Muslim nations didn’t buy this idea? They did. Their fertility rate is cratering…with Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran already breeding below the replacement rate and the rest of the Muslim world racing to catch up.

Ultimately, I think modern immigration is happening for the same reason it happened towards the end of the Roman Empire – the outsiders saw the great wealth and social stability of the Roman world and wanted to be part of it…and as the Romans were dying off for lack of children, might as well move in, right? But at least those barbarians were fertile! We’re being replaced by people who are only slightly less sterile than we are, and who are eagerly trying to become as sterile as we.

You know what is going to happen? The Haredi are going to happen. These ultra-orthodox Jews are going to make the running because they are the people bothering to have kids. They have 6.2 children per woman – and while their numbers are small, they will be the people sticking around for the future. I think this sort of thing will be duplicated in small groups…Christians, Muslims, what have you…but they’ll be groups of people who decide to get off the culture of death cycle and start having kids. They’ll pick up whatever pieces we leave behind…and I do wonder what sort of world it will be like? It won’t be like this one, that is for sure…

The best approach to ending mass murder incidents at public school seems pretty straightforward; make schools more secure. At the high school my son went to, there was only one to get into the school during school hours. You had to enter into a secure vestibule, then be buzzed into the main office by a staffer. This simple expedient, coupled with an alert staff, would have prevented what happened in Florida. It also would have worked at Sandy Hook.

This is true – but, also, a little sad. The thing about breaking the big rules is that you don’t end up with no rules, but with a lot of little rules, instead. We broke the big rules about what it means to be a man ’round about 50 years ago…and now we’re forced to enact a whole series of little rules to ensure that when the males who don’t know how to be men go nuts, fewer people will be killed and injured.

Men need to feel valued as providers and protectors. If men are not valued as such, then they will tend towards a nihilistic destructiveness. As no one was writing things down way back when, we don’t know if it was a man who cut the deal with the woman or the woman who cut the deal with the man, but the deal was struck: woman sticks loyally to the man and the man, in turn, sticks loyally with the woman…providing sustenance for their children and protection against other men. And when that deal was struck, however it was struck, for the first time a male became a man.

Yes, this does presuppose that the man, in return for doing his part, will gain a bit of authority – in Roman times, they called it pater familias. The concept was, ultimately, that if a man was to tie himself to one woman and make certain that she and all children were cared for, he was to exercise a level of authority over the family. Fair? Fair has nothing to do with it: it was what it was. It turned brutish males into civilized men who would throw their lives away in defense of wife, children and home. If you wonder at the return of the brutish male, look no further than our destruction of the idea of the man as protector and provider.

Build your security gates. Continue to drug males who won’t fit in. Jail them in ever greater numbers. Propagandize against “toxic masculinity” all you want. But unless men feel themselves to be part of a larger whole and have distinct duties and privileges attached to that, then we’ll continue to get madmen wading into our schools to kill.

Red meat has been condemned as a cancer-causing, blood pressure-raising no-no.

Indeed, nutritional guidelines in both the UK and the US advise eating no more than 70g of beef, pork, or steak per day.

But a new review of clinical trials from Purdue University has found quite the opposite.

According to the study, eating more than the recommended daily amount of red meat does not affect short-term heart disease risk factors, such as blood pressure and blood cholesterol.

Here, for free, I will provide the tried and true George C. Noonan, Jr diet:

Eat whatever you want – just in moderation.

You know – having a bacon double cheesegburger every week will not kill you. Sure, having three a day is probably unwise…but if you’re craving some bacony goodness, have at it. Dad lived until 82. Didn’t exercise after he got out of the Marines. Ate red meat, salted his food, smoked and drank at least one whiskey a day (weekends and, after retirement, two) for his adult life. He died from complications resulting from a problem he was genetically born with.

I’d like to note that if you eat right and exercise daily, you’re going to die, anyway.

This sort of thing always brings me to a bit of fury at the stupidity of the modern world. Remember, it is “settled science” that red meat is bad. Call any doctor or nutritionist you like right this moment and ask them if you should be eating bacon double cheeseburgers and they will say, “no”. But here’s the reality – human beings have been eating bacon, beef, cheese and bread for, oh, about 100,000 years or so. Bacon and beef aren’t poison – they are food. Regular, normal, human food which our bodies are designed to process for excellent nutritional benefit. We’ve been sold a line of nonsense – and the line has been sold by people who for bizarre reasons have developed a moral aversion to eating things like red meat while also desiring that everyone else toe their line.

To be sure, if all you do is sit on your rear all day and eat things like bacon double cheeseburgers, you’re going to find yourself in serious health difficulty – but it won’t be because of the food, itself. It will be because you are a glutton and a lazy bones. Gluttony and sloth put you at risk of two things: losing your immortal soul and, of course, keeling over from a heart attack at 50 years old. But eating a nice steak doesn’t put you at risk of anything; and no matter what the vegetarians, PETA and assorted nagging Progressive Puritans say, the fact is that steak is just food. Nothing more, nothing less.

I know it’s a weird thing to go on a rant about, but it just sickens me that so much of what is normal and human is condemned these days. Can’t eat meat; can’t smoke tobacco; can’t drink booze; can’t have a bonfire on the beach; can’t drive off road; must stay on the designated paths while walking in the woods; can’t laugh at certain jokes…all in the name of some alleged cause of Justice and Saving The World. I ask: what is the point of saving the world if we can’t enjoy living in it? My dad, towards the end, was given the medical lecture: stop smoking, don’t drink any more, don’t salt your food, no more red meat. His attitude to that was, “if living means I have to give up what I enjoy, what’s the point of doing it?”.

An anti-abortion group on Tuesday released an undercover video of an executive at Planned Parenthood sipping red wine while discussing in graphic detail how to abort a fetus to preserve its organs for medical research — and also the costs associated with sharing that tissue with scientists.

The video, filmed by a group called the Center for Medical Progress, threatens to reignite a long-standing debate over the use of fetal tissue harvested through abortions, and could add fuel to efforts seeking to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy…

Planned Parenthood is claiming that this is all done with permission from the victims and that they don’t profit off it. But, all that is just bull. If someone gives you money for something, you certainly aren’t losing money from the deal…and as the video shows the PP doctor going into detail about how careful they are to kill in a manner which preserves body parts, it is highly unlikely there is no profit involved (you simply wouldn’t work that hard at a thing unless there’s a payday at the end of it). Do keep in mind that the PP doctor was having a nice meal while discussing the horrific practice…new idea for a movie: Breakfast at Mengele’s.

This should cause an immediate end to any government funding of Planned Parenthood, but I also urge people not to get too hung up just on that organization. They are not instigators of the modern barbarism but just an effect of it. And just you wait – with assisted suicide rolling down the line, we’ll be harvesting organs from the elderly, ill and depressed in short order. This is what comes of a society which does not hold to the sanctity of human life. If you wonder why our free speech and freedom of religion is under attack, look no further than the attitude which allows elective abortion and assisted suicide. If human life is contingent upon the convenience of others, then it is nothing to destroy their freedom of speech and conscience.

Abortion was, is and always will be the most important issue – if we can’t protect the lives of children, then we can’t protect anyone’s life. If the life of a child is worthless, then all our lives are worthless. This is why the conservative movement must never, ever give up on the life issue. It is the key to all things – if we can’t defend life, then we are defending nothing at all.

A lawmaker in Ohio wants stores in the state to pay triple wages for employees who work on Thanksgiving, an effort that comes as Macy’s, the holiday’s quintessential retailer, is allowing its workers to choose whether to work that day.

Both are attempts to counter frustration among workers and their families over holiday store hours that have expanded into the holiday.

State Rep. Mike Foley, a Democrat from Cleveland, said his bill would allow employees to bow out of the holiday shift without job sanctions while protecting family time from excessive consumerism…

I absolutely loath the idea of working on a holiday. As a matter of principal, I’ll accept being fired before I’d ever work on Christmas, Easter or Thanksgiving. My employer is currently closed on Christmas and asks for volunteers on Thanksgiving (and pays them triple time for doing it), while on Easter I’ve always managed to get a vacation day for it. Things like New Year’s Day, Fourth of July and such are a bit of a different animal – New Year’s Day off is only really important if you’re rather hung over from the night before, while the Fourth only gets rolling as the sun goes down. But the basic idea I hold is, still, that holidays are, well, holidays – and by and large everyone should be off. Other than crucial things such as hospitals, pharmacies and gas stations, everything else should be closed to the largest degree possible – some exceptions for vacation resorts, of course, because vacation resorts are designed, as it were, to care for people during holidays. But to have some retailer drag their people in on a holiday? Obscene. Stupid, too – you don’t actually increase your sales by doing that: you just move them from the day after the holiday to the day of.

I don’t like the idea of the government forcing businesses to close or pay massive increases in pay for holiday work but, goodness, corporations can be infuriatingly inhuman in their actions. I don’t know which nimrod in a boardroom first thought that being at work on a holiday would be a good idea, but I’d erect a statue in his memory, with “Idiot” on the name plate.

There is nothing wrong with working hard and trying to get ahead. Businesses do have to be profitable to survive – but there’s a time to work, and a time to not work. God is a little wiser than all of us, after all, and He did state that we should take a day of rest every week…not be open 24-7 in the hopes of squeezing out one more tenth of a percent of profit for the quarter. Let us, good people, be human – and let us therefore take a day off. Its not like its every week there’s a holiday – if the cash register isn’t ka-chinging merrily four or five days a year, it won’t kill anyone.